A note on how I create

I still have my very first lifebook.

I made it long before any of this – drawing the pictures myself in coloured pencil, writing the stories beside them. In it I wrote out my dreams as though they had already happened. Ordinary mornings. Evening tea. Small walks with my family. A home, a garden. Not in a naïve way, not this is exactly how it will go – but as a way of making visible what was already inside me. Giving shape to the stories that hadn't yet found words.

It helped more than I can say. Putting it on paper made so much clearer what I actually wanted, and what didn't really matter at all.

But I am not a skilled artist, and I always pushed against that edge – the vision in my head was so much more alive than anything I could make with a pencil. There was a gap. A longing to bring out what I could see so clearly inside, and couldn't quite reach.

My teenage son was the one who introduced me to AI. Honestly, my first thought was that's not for me – I don't do those things. But I tried. At first the images came out generic, the way they do. And then, slowly, I learned to make them the way I love. The way they look in my own head. For the first time, I could give my dreams an outpouring – I could create images that matched the world inside me.

I know there are opinions on this from every direction, and everyone has their own. I am not here to argue any of them. I only want to tell you, gently, how it works for me.

I use it as a tool. An aid. My own creativity stays at the centre – I love slow, handmade things, real nature, paper books, journals, writing by hand. So that is what my work is, mostly: pages left open for handwriting, for drawing, for gluing in pressed plants, your own art, your photographs. You can add your own images through Canva, or your own drawings, or leave the space clean for ink. AI-made pictures are only one possibility among many. Something you may use – never something you must.

Because here is what I have come to believe. Any tool can be used wisely or carelessly – even a knife. What matters is the hand that holds it, and the care behind it.

I am tired of the way these conversations swing from one extreme to the other. I wanted to show that there can be peace here too. That you can trust your own sense of things, instead of fighting, instead of arguing – and find that quiet point of balance that no one else can give you. It has to come from within.

I have chosen, consciously, to keep slowness in my life. The real, the human, the handmade. And strangely, this tool has helped me bring that part of myself out of hiding – used with care, the way I would use any other.

And I leave myself free to change my mind, to grow, to know more tomorrow than I do today. This is a new world for all of us. None of us has to have it all figured out.

So make your lifebook however feels true to you. By hand, in paint, in photographs, in pressed flowers – or with a little help from something new. There is no wrong way to come home to yourself.